Prima Belladonna

Almost immediately in Vermilion Sands, where this first story is set, I can see traces of Estrella de Mar, and Eden-Olympia, the decadence, the quavering ideals and the characters who find niches in the underbelly.

Anyway, this is a story about a man who runs a choro-flora (musical plants, apparently) shop, whose life gets turned upside-down by Jane Ciracylides, a mysterious singer with an affinity for these musical plants. Weird stuff happens, beer is drunk on balconies, and Jane disappears at the end of the story, last heard of in several places, reminding me a lot of Holly Golightly of Truman Capote's novella.

I'm glad to see that even with his earliest stories, JGB can make the most outlandish situations sound perfectly normal. The first book of his that I read was Crash, which makes the shocking and perverse world of its characters make complete sense. Prima Belladonna pulls the same trick. Sample sentence:

The next three or four days at the store were audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear.

Great stuff. I'm looking forward to the rest of the stories and the development of Vermilion Sands into (possibly) the resorts I know from the novels.